Gigantic: Rampage Edition is free to claim on Epic Games this week, so if you might be interested in the future, it would be worth grabbing now.

At 15:05 it isn’t clear what is meant by a “full campaign”, but it does sound like you can set up games to be only one age. I hope so, as I am skeptical about swapping civilizations. It was actually the primary thing that put me off Humankind, rather than a selling point. Resetting not only your Civ’s identity but also the world’s resources, map size, and the tech tree is concerning. If one age isn’t an option, I am sure mods will save us at least.

Mod support and multiplayer are huge interests for dedicated fans, so hopefully we will get more information soon. VI improved a lot from V, so I expect it will be good.

I prefer the new graphics to Civ VI’s overall, but I don’t want to say it actually tops V until I’ve played it myself. A few screens seemed visually unfinshed. Story events, navigable rivers, leader skill trees, and the calamities at the end of ages seem intriguing at least. No mention of a world congress, hopefully they have a better system in mind than VI’s.

Still curious about culture progression. They didn’t show a card system like VI, so that at least makes me hopeful. Ideally I would like a permanent unlock/upgrade tree and a way to temporarily boost something at a cost in another system, like edicts in Stellaris.

Looks like districts and wonders still take a tile to build, but now other buildings do too? Cities sprawl out a lot, and are diverse within. Perhaps we will be able to build duplicate buildings that were previously one per city, especially since they mentioned city specializations. It also seems like workers/builders might be attached to a particular city rather than movable units.

Overall, I’m a bit less excited and more worried. There were a lot of changes from V to VI that I was disappointed with from the onset and honestly they did not grow on me.

You can get more reasonable prices per sandwich with coupon codes. For the ones near me, they almost always have a “FLBOGO” or “BOGOFTL” or “FTL1299” or similar variation to get two for the price of one. But YMMV and you have to be ok with leftovers if you’re eating alone.

Op discovers fiat currency.

Exactly. People aren’t taking issue with the idea that their country’s product compares poorly to another country’s product, it’s that some random person’s random encounters are enough to make that judgement. Sweeping generalizations very often do more harm than good.

I only played Stellaris off and on, but I went years without buying an expansion and always thought the new systems were complete and better than what they replaced when I returned. Breaking current saves is frustrating, so I guess you would need to delay an update if you had one you planned on returning to.

If you didn’t know, you can roll back to older versions of steam games with some work. A few games have a built-in system, but most of the tile you have to manually replace files after redownloading the old versions.

I took it to be a coyote. They go after sheep sometimes. Also, they are associated with being trickster figures in mythology.

This is a TF2 reference.

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/ÜberCharge

Here’s the thing…if you get upset that a random woman that you don’t know would take the hyperbolic position that they would rather be in the same room as a bear than with you, you’re likely the exact type of man that these memes are talking about.

What the heck? Expressing resentment at the implication that you are more threatening than a bear based solely on gender is evidence that you are, in fact, more threatening than a bear? How does that follow? You don’t need to have a fragile ego to recognize the unfairness of it.

They know how dangerous a bear is.

If they would rather be alone with a bear than a random stranger of any gender I’m going to say they don’t.

The original post was a bad-faith engagement farm that became much more popular than it ever should have been. It ended up bringing up a bit of good discussion and a lot of insane takes.

When games go too far with this, it can encourage exploit or cheese strategies, or at least strict adherence to a meta build. This can actually mean resorting to a solution with less skill needed, since the game has already been effectively solved. A still-challenging situation that doesn’t demand perfection can be reasonably done with unoptimized preparation and adaptation.

That’s not really how these stories went, at least for the ones involving mortals. The gods used favored mortals or demigod children as proxies instead. So maybe you could interpret Athena turning one of Poseidon’s lovers into a hideous creature as her way of punishing him.

Depending on the telling, Poseidon/Neptune had sex with her in a temple dedicated to Athena/Minerva, and the latter transformed her as punishment. Then she may have just been chilling until Perseus came along to behead her for an unrelated situation.

I like most of these changes. Several jokers that immediately justified building around got toned back.

Magician giving two lucky cards instead of one makes lucky cat a lot stronger, and it’s getting buffed independently already. Steel joker nerf and glass joker buffs seem good too. Campfire nerf is harsh, but justified.

I’m surprised hologram isn’t getting nerfed. It quickly pays off with already good stuff like DNA or even certificate, and even without much synergy just buying standard packs makes it strong.

The vampire and midas mask nerfs seem overly harsh though. It was a powerful combo, but it required two specific uncommon jokers and time to scale. With both parts being harder to proc, and the payoff being cut in half, I can’t think of a situation where you would really want vampire. I guess if you have face card synergy you could run midas mask for a while until you have most of your deck golden, but even then I would be tempted to swap to something else pretty quickly. Golden cards just don’t have much payoff. I would have buffed the devil tarot to target two before the magician for the same reason.

Yes, it seems to be both to help the laid off folks add to their portfolio and a hope that its popularity will draw attention from a publisher. Seems like the best strategy available to them in the circumstances and I hope it works out for them.

Burgers are something I missed a lot too! Fortunately plant-based options are becoming more common in fast food places and grocery stores. It usually does come at an upcharge though, so I don’t get them too much. Other people have mixed opinions on meat substitutes, but they have been great for me.

This meme’s text has figures about “now” but doesn’t note that it is mostly a paraphrased quote from Deus Ex, a video game set in a fictional dystopian version of America in 2052. The speaker is not in fact talking about 2024 America. But even for the past figures, I would want citations.

The first part seems to be talking about tax sources as a portion of total taxes raised, which isn’t easy to search for. I did find a table that cited whitehouse.gov and recorded income collections compared to total GDP at least. It did peak in 1945, but only at 7.1%.

The US Bureau of Labor doesn’t seem to have records on self-employment before 1948. The only thing I could find talking about self-employment in 1900 was a blog post that said it was 50%. 90% self-employment sounds like a lot of subsistence farming and odd-jobs work, which isn’t exactly the ideal economic model.

The Deus Ex part is part of a longer conversation, but here is the relevant section:

JC Denton: Just answer the question.
Leo Gold: Don’t believe me? It’s all in the numbers. For a hundred years, there’s been a conspiracy of plutocrats against ordinary people.
JC Denton: Do you have a single fact to back that up?
Leo Gold: Number one: In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent. Number two: in 1900, 90 percent of Americans were self-employed; now it’s about two percent.
JC Denton: So?
Leo Gold: It’s called consolidation. Strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes, this can be done imperceptibly over time.

If you had lived at an earlier point, there’s a good chance your eyesight would have been better. Not just because of natural selection for genes or whatever. The modern spread of nearsightedness is primarily attributed to greater time spent indoors, looking at things close to you like books, and particularly during childhood. It is largely nurture instead of nature.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220927-can-you-prevent-short-sightedness-in-kids

This could probqbly an alias for “user error”.

Besides exhausting the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief if they think about it, it honestly just feels like a waste of potential when shows do this. Redemption arcs go hard.

The taste of their food and the beauty of their women made the British the best sailors in the world.